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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28700202">kasten, reborn</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ebaz/pseuds/Ebaz'>Ebaz</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Rigel Black Series - murkybluematter</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, Inspired by The Rigel Black Chronicles, Pre-Canon, Rigel Black Chronicles Masquerade 2021, aroace Kasten, transmasc Kasten</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 06:49:05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,994</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28700202</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ebaz/pseuds/Ebaz</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Newborns are easily overwhelmed by new sensations. Kasten tries his best to overcome.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Kasten &amp; Count Aurel, Kasten &amp; Original Female Character(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>34</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Rigel Black Chronicles Masquerade 2021</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>kasten, reborn</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He has always been dimly aware that the reborn undergo an intensification of the senses; the family library has a handful of sources that mention it, more of them secondary accounts than firsthand, none of them lingering long on the subject. For better or for worse, he now has the experience, if not the inclination, to offer an alternative description. It is not intensification he feels—pain does not sear more acutely, nor does honey taste more sweet—but an expansion of sensory awareness: he tastes honey-sweetness on the words of others, feels the pain of sunlight and barbed glances, hears and feels and <em>embodies</em> the sensation of absence, the unceasing stillness of his body in the moments he does not apply conscious effort toward movement.</p>
<p>For each sensation he had previously known, there are a hundred new ones to catalog. He muddles through his first year of rebirth this way, reminding himself at regular intervals of the benefits of assessing new experiences, clinging to that goal to stay afloat while mired in the jarring unfamiliarity of <em>everything</em>. He has salvaged his memory and methods from his previous life, but they do little to mitigate the frustrating helplessness of moving through the world with the bodily experience of an infant—and unlike human children, who have the advantage of visibly appearing incapable, his body smooths his actions into something lithe and unnerving, bearing little trace of the clumsiness with which he attempts to direct his limbs.</p>
<p>The compounding disconnect between his ungainly thoughts and their impossibly-fluid results earns him more brushes with near-death in these few years than he’d ever had in his previous life. He catalogs these, too, and keeps their potential remedies close at hand.</p>
<p>The family of his previous life tolerates him for a time, but the chilly comforts of the cellar of the family estate become rougher to the touch as his siblings return with nieces and nephews he is never allowed to meet. He hears them listening on occasion, their curiosity shivering the air around him, his own siblings’ muted fear hot and sharp despite their soft voices. He learns to distinguish between personages this way—which magical signatures burn and which rustle, which reflect the sensations around them and which absorb and diffuse them. He wonders what their names are, sometimes, when he can remember his own.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Grandfather appears early one night to take him away. His siblings see him out with as much grace as they can muster, and for once in his two lives he is sure they are grateful that he has never enjoyed hugs. He feels their worry and love and overwhelming relief like wind off the sea, calming and crisp and gone the moment the door is closed.</p>
<p>They take most of the night to reach England on a carpet cloaked from human perception. Grandfather does not use a wand to direct their course; he traces runes into the luxurious pile at regular intervals, and the wool redyes itself. Only the warning-tales he has heard of disrespectful newborns keep him from asking after this process in detail, or asking aloud if the wand that appears in Grandfather’s portraits is as vital to his magic as its depicted prominence would have it seem. He wonders if his own reliance on runic casting is something his grandfather shares—if, perhaps, this is a point of familiarity to Grandfather and not the hindrance those around him have always believed it to be—but he does not ask, and Grandfather says little.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>The Lamia Lodge upends his senses afresh. Proximity to so many others with the same spiky sensitivities pings another of his new awarenesses, one that buzzes low and omnidirectional. The sharp fear and high-fluttering curiosity of his previous home are masked here under the weight of a tangled mass of new sensations, more saturated in color but thankfully manageable in intensity, and he allows himself time to sort out the source of each tendril. He learns to isolate his grandfather’s slow-to-build anger from Irina’s avalanche temper, the impatient pulse of Gavril’s boredom and the resonant tones of Faina’s resolute calm, and then his own methodical enjoyment, floating atop the rest in its proximity.</p>
<p>He feels as though he should have figured that one out first, but it’s possible that it hadn’t existed until now. Now, he finally, <em>finally</em> has his distillery back: Florentin, the only sibling he has ever trusted with the full extent of his research, has carefully packed each vial in its own separate cushioning charm and brought the lot of them as far as the edge of magical London, where he leaves them with a barkeep English mages consider trustworthy. It is an embarrassing ordeal, attempting to slip unnoticed through family-friendly Diagon Alley with Gavril tailing him—as if Kasten unattended would lose sight of his life’s purpose in a fresh-blooded crowd—but the vials are retrieved with only a handful of fearful spikes to his senses.</p>
<p>He transforms his basement quarters with a series of interlocked runes in the Khutsuri script he learned from his mother and organizes his distillations on temperature-controlled shelves. The magic in his runes feels different now, too, but he has little room in his mind for it at the moment.</p>
<p>He has little room for anything else now that his work is in motion again. These new feelings are the ones he memorizes feverishly: the ease with which he controls the centrifuge; the subtle differences in resonance between substances combined and separated; the harmony between essences of specific viscosities; the low rumble of circulating blood upstairs, the smell of spilt blood, the pull of it, and he is at the door to Einrí’s quarters, <em>tasting blood on the air</em>, and the realization hits, metallic—it has been days since he fed last, days since he last left his distillery.</p>
<p>He is downstairs again in a flash, breathing deliberately, his movements still too smooth to betray the shakiness he feels. He composes himself enough to call for Irina, who wears an expression even he can tell is patronizing even as he keeps his voice as steady as ever. She returns in fifteen minutes with a brimming goblet and a key to a set of rooms upstairs. <em>A nursery for the newborn</em>, she calls it with a laugh like a faceted jewel, and he accepts both without comment. He waits until she leaves to raise the cup to his lips and drinks with embarrassing fervor.</p>
<p>He does not lose control again. He spends a month developing another Khutsuri sequence that he implants inside his work table: every forty-eight hours it sends a ripple of sound through whichever surface he is currently touching, reminding him to take stock of his new body’s needs. Once he locates the storerooms, he finds it is most expedient to retrieve blood from there; it is quicker and easier than Faina and Einrí’s preferred methods, and he uses his quarters solely for resting, though less regularly and less thoroughly than he feeds.</p>
<p>Thus, the routine is built: he distills six nights a week, compiling notes and planning further research on the seventh. He shops when someone will take him and sits midnights with the rest of the Lodge when cajoled, and he takes his meals in private. The routine carries him for years, and it serves him surprisingly well—Grandfather grants him permission to wander only three decades after his rebirth (much to the displeasure of the next-youngest Faina, who was made to wait twice as long). He wonders if Grandfather even expects him to use the privilege.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>He meets Consolata in a forest near Messina. He is hunting for the Sicilian fir, an endangered tree whose sap cannot be purchased anywhere in magical London; she is hunting for those unfortunate enough to wander the woods at night. They inconvenience each other’s plans just enough that a confrontation is inevitable.</p>
<p>They both manage to speak enough of the Florentine dialect to figure out how to leave each other alone, or so Kasten thinks. When she seeks him out again a few nights later, however, he wonders if perhaps his words have different meanings in Sicilian.</p>
<p>Consolata tells him, over and over, that she is alone. <em>Abbandonata, destituita, solissima</em>. He is the first of her kind she’s seen in the single decade of her reborn life. If he understands correctly, she doesn’t even remember who chose her for rebirth, perhaps has never known. She has been forced to keep to the densest patches of forest, where the loggers and cityfolk rarely venture. Her voice scratches ten times coarser than his own, as if it’s the first time she’s spoken in years.</p>
<p>It hits him, then, that this is how the majority of his kind live, not only those without his family history but those without covens, without communities to claim them. He has known this, has read his share of testimonies and histories of his kind, but here and now he hears it in his chest, a thousand fir-needles pressing in on him at once. Such is the volume of grief with which she addresses him.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>She sits with him in the distillery most nights, Grandfather having made painfully clear that she is <em>his</em> responsibility. He has never wanted a research companion, but Consolata is content to quietly puzzle through Einrí’s old alchemical treatises while he works, and the shared silence is not unpleasant. The translation sequence he has written for her is less than perfect, the best he can do with languages he only half-remembers, and she hesitantly calls him over once or twice each night to clarify concepts twisted through too many tongues.</p>
<p>He puts aside his third fir sample to insert an exception into the rune sequence—they have agreed that most Latin terms are better off untranslated—when he feels Consolata’s gaze gently pushing from the periphery. Against his better judgment, he meets it in an attempt to anticipate her question.</p>
<p>This is the reason Kasten avoids eye contact in this life with even more passion than he did in his first: Consolata’s deep brown eyes amplify all of the sensations he does not want to sense from her, all knowledge welcome and unwelcome. Her intense curiosity and slight frustration, the steady beat of mostly-successful decoding—and Kasten himself, reflected in her eyes as he appears to her, sharp and firm and with only a hint of the softness that overwhelmed his previous life’s form, <em>masculine</em> in all the ways that matter to Consolata. he reels internally and his body (graceful, unsoft, blessedly masculine) does nothing but finish its action, replacing his quill on the table in one fluid motion and wrenching his gaze away.</p>
<p>Consolata, he knows, feels the disparate sensations he surely emanates: the uncharacteristically sharp satisfaction of being recognized as unfeminine, the chasm deliberately placed between himself and anything resembling desire, the lingering hum of concentration on Latin alchemical terms, the growing pool of shame at his unintentional intrusion. Or maybe she feels them all at once in an overwhelming tangle, too young in this life to know which strands are which, and maybe he has hurt her—the apology sticks in his throat as she whirls around and disappears.</p>
<p>He finishes the alterations to the translation sequence, refines it as much as he can, leaves a note at her quarters in his finest penmanship. And she does return, with a teary smile and gratitude for the translation, but only once.</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Maricara takes her within the month. He endures grandfather’s punishment.</p>
<p>He wonders, alone in his quarters, when he will have collected enough sensations to make them run together, dull and unsurprising. He had not even managed that with a limited palette of senses in his first life.</p>
<p>Best to look away from his unending future. Best to focus on the process that brings him there with purpose.</p>
<p>He unrolls his notes on cytotoxins and reads until daybreak.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>kasten, walking into a clearing: excuse me ma’am, have you seen this tree *holds up hand-drawn diagram*</p>
<p>consolata: im literally drinking a person rn</p>
<p>kasten, nodding: yes, i can wait</p></blockquote></div></div>
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